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CAPABILITY

Leadership

Helping clients build and expand leadership capabilities at scale for executives and leaders at all levels.

Overview

With Accenture Leadership solutions we help our clients build and expand leadership capabilities at scale for executives as well as leaders at all levels, especially those with managerial or supervisory responsibilities.

We work to develop a leadership strategy and architecture that is aligned with the corporate strategy, and then we focus on innovative and high-impact learning and development programs for leaders throughout the organization.

  • Energizing leadership at all levels. The attitudes and behaviors of leaders are a key influence on strategy execution, corporate culture and interaction with customers.

    In addition, Accenture’s differentiating view is that leadership strategy and development must focus on more than only the small percentage of leaders at the top of the enterprise. Leaders in the middle of the organization actually make up about 50 percent of a company; if they are not effectively engaged and enabled, they may actually prevent the entire company from achieving its goals.

    If this group is engaged and capable, however, it can increase the productivity of the organization by one or two standard deviations; it is a very powerful lever to pull.

    Accenture undertakes continuous research into leadership principles and practices to understand what makes leaders successful—at the top of the house and at all levels in the organization. This research shapes our evolving approaches and helps us advise our clients.

  • Leadership in the context of talent development. At Accenture, Leadership solutions are part of a broader offering focused on Talent—to help ensure that work in the leadership area is aligned with other types of activities such as developing a human capital strategy; establishing new workforce behaviors as well as an effective leadership culture; managing organization change; fostering an innovative and powerful learning environment; establishing performance management processes, succession planning, HR processes, governance and more.

WHY ACCENTURE

Accenture is a global leader in providing innovative leadership solutions that are aligned with business strategy and that enable new mindsets as well as new behaviors among leaders at all relevant levels of the organization. We maintain a relentless focus on driving measurable improvements in the performance of people and the entire organization.

We have a proven track record delivering these benefits, enabled by our global infrastructure and extensive assets including a technology platform for leadership. Accenture’s distinctive capabilities include:

  • Global experience. Experience working with organizations of all sizes, including 91 of the Fortune Global 100 and more than three quarters of the Fortune Global 500.

  • Focus on results. Accenture delivers measurable improvements in business performance. We commit to specified outcomes and we deliver. We are also highly committed to client satisfaction and strong client relationships.

  • Validated leadership assessment. We offer a range of validated and action-oriented 360º leadership assessment tools to facilitate assessment of leaders against required competencies and develop appropriate leadership behaviors through focused one-to-one and team coaching.

  • Extensive industry and client experience. We bring to our clients a wealth of both cross-industry and client experience in leadership development. We also draw on our network of global experts for input and for validation of our recommendations and outputs.

  • Commitment to innovation and proprietary research. Accenture’s leadership approach is built upon 25 years of proprietary and differentiated research that focuses on the critical levers that make a significant impact on leadership effectiveness. Our innovative leadership solutions are also based on our broad experience working with clients around the world in every industry. Our practitioners work closely with our researchers, as well as leading universities and external research organizations. This work generates practical insights that help our leadership solutions deliver timely guidance about issues our clients are facing today, as well as challenges just appearing on the horizon.

  • Distinctive approaches to learning and development. Accenture is a recognized leader in the field of enterprise learning, and we harness our many assets to create a varied, action learning-based experience. Accenture Academy, for example, offers a “Change Academy” with a curriculum that enables tailored capability development at all relevant levels of leadership for a particular organization.

SPECIFIC SERVICES

Accenture Leadership solutions are underpinned by comprehensive Leadership analytics and include:

Leadership strategy and architecture: Leadership strategy focuses on what types of leadership behaviors and attitudes are required, given the organization’s enterprise strategy. It also then plots out the best distribution of those behaviors at different levels and units of the organization by predicting a leader’s potential based on the key attributes of high-performing leaders.

In addition, a broader and integrated architecture is required both so that leadership development draws on the full capabilities of the company, and so that leadership influences those capabilities in the long run. Many companies now require a global architecture that links a) talent identification and selection, b) career pathways based on distinct levels of leadership, and c) leadership development interventions aligned to each career turning point. The architecture sets global standards for job performance at each leadership level.

Increasingly, leadership strategy must include planning for the development of change leaders—executives adept at managing the complexities of organization change. Based on Accenture’s market-leading organization change practice, we have synthesized years of experience in change management and transformational change into the leadership components necessary to drive success.

Leadership development: Our leadership development programs for executive leaders, change leaders and leaders at all levels are based on three key principles:

  • Build leadership as an organizational capability. Leadership is more than simply a role; it’s a capability to be developed and managed. Everyone in an organization needs some component of leadership development, and leaders need to be aligned with each other in terms of the direction of the enterprise, and aligned as well with the business strategy itself.

  • Accelerate leadership development through “action learning.” Action learning—that is, learning by doing and reflecting—speeds the acquisition of leadership capabilities and the demonstration of the right leadership behaviors. This continuous doing and reflecting (reinforced through one-to-one or team guidance) enables leaders to understand how their personality styles, teaming and decision-making processes shape daily work outcomes. At Accenture, we find that an especially effective action learning environment involves a focus on the actual, real-time organization change issues with which a client is dealing—further emphasizing the importance of effective change leadership.

  • Use analytic assessments to drive self-reflection. Analytics underpins Accenture’s entire suite of leadership solutions, from strategy to development. However, analytics can be especially effective in providing realistic analyses of how leaders are progressing in their development—helping leaders gain insights and understanding from their experience.